That is not to say the threat of witches to poison the patriarch has completely disappeared. The representations of witches that dominate contemporary American cultural consciousness-the “Surprise, Bitch” meme from American Horror Story, Stevie Nicks, people who talk about healing stones a lot-betray the role witches could have played in undoing the nation. In the early days of America, when accusations of witchcraft were leveled at Indians, Black people, and settlers who strayed from the strict disciplining needed to create a cohesive sovereignty of one dominant nation, it was because witches were a threat. The current trend in witch infatuation marks an alliance foreclosed. I am sympathetic to this appeal even as I am suspicious of it it marks a desire to be contrary to the colonial project, even if it does not always enact it. In the current fashion and fashioning of witches, the historical connections between witches and racialized savages, however sublimated, continues to magnetize the appeal. The occult is after all definitionally about power that obscures its origin. The turn to witchcraft as a trend (rather than a practice) is conditioned by white women’s desire to obfuscate the power begotten by their whiteness. Though it is the subtext of savagery (ascribed to both Indigenous and African-descendent peoples in the Americas) that animates narratives around witches, white women who take up the mantle of witch magic rarely understand themselves to be engaging in Indian or savage play.
![twitter witch it twitter witch it](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FA2xSn_UcAEM0_k.jpg)
How many viewers who delighted in the uninhibited fire dance at the end of the film gave even a second thought to the brief glimpse of Native men at the beginning? This interest, broadcast by crystal-wearing enthusiasts all over various social media and fashion editorials, rarely attends with such historical accuracy as The Witch to the specter of savagery that witches once promised. The film’s unexpected performance at the box office-grossing $40.4 million on a budget of $4 million-might in part be attributed to a recent revival in America’s interest in witches.
Tellingly and expectedly, in The Witch it is the teenage girl of a Puritan family who, in coming into maturity and sexuality, brings witchery into the home. This intimacy with land is then projected onto Indigenous forms of sociality and sexuality deemed unruly and un-Christian.
![twitter witch it twitter witch it](https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1451648287056990208/pu/img/ICz7Z3g5EUNCvPcp.jpg)
In the mid-17th-century atmosphere in which this “New England folktale” takes place, the threat of witches follows from a fear of the Natives and their grounded intimacy with a coveted land yet to be tamed by settlement. Witch magic, the frightened mother of a stricken child intones, is Indian magic.
![twitter witch it twitter witch it](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DncCh72WwAATTap.jpg)
But through subtle, fleeting cues throughout the film, we have been made to understand their association with Natives lurking just off frame. In the 2015 film The Witch, this iconic round-the-fire ritual is a climactic reveal of witches living in the woods. Their chants intensify and they begin to dance, then levitate, with flailing arms and jackknife knees. Their hair is long and their language foreign. An opening in the thicket we witness naked figures gathering around a growing fire.